Quick Start: Animating a Dancing Cartoon Moose


When you first got your hands on 3ds Max, you were probably focused on one goal-creating cool 3D images and animations. I know that many of you bought Max to make money, claim a tax write-off, earn a way to Hollywood, or impress your girlfriend or boyfriend, but I'll just ignore those reasons for now. The goal is to create something cool.

If you've perused this book's Table of Contents or thumbed through its many pages, you've seen sections on modeling, materials, dynamics, and other topics. But if you're like me, you don't want to wade through tons of material before you have something to show off to Mom. (Actually, if you're like me, then you've opened straight to the special effects section, in which case you won't be reading this.)

The purpose of this Quick Start is to give you a taste of what Max can do. This soaring view of the software from 20,000 feet is intended to show you the big picture before you delve into the details. It exposes you to some of the most common features and hopefully whets your appetite for the more in-depth chapters to follow.

This part of the book is intended for those new to the software. If you're an experienced user, then your mom no doubt is already impressed with your work, so you can happily advance to whichever chapter appeals to you. (Forgive me for catering to the "newbie," but we were all beginners once.)

3D Cartoons-Planning the Production

For this Quick Start, let's focus on something for the kids. 3D cartoons have done extremely well at the box office lately, but they also show up in games and all over television. When I was young, cartoons were limited to Saturday morning, but kids now can watch cartoons 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This hardly seems fair, but as long as the demand is high, let's give the kids something fun to look at. What could be funnier than a dancing cartoon moose? (Actually, a pig that does karate would also be very fun, but we'll stick with the moose.)

A cartoon moose gives us a chance to create a highly stylized character and keeps us away from the photorealistic requirements that take lots of time to tweak to get just right. If a cartoon moose is a little out of whack, then we are much more forgiving than if we were looking at a runway model.

The first step is to design a cartoon moose. By giving the moose some thought beforehand, we avoid some of the modeling headaches that would arise if we didn't have a reference sketch. The sketch we're starting from is a clever moose sketch drawn by my brother Chris, shown in Figure QS.1. This character was featured previously in the http://www.Animabets.com site and deserves to be revisited.

Note 

Most images you find in books and magazines or on the Web are copyrighted (including this cartoon moose image), so be aware of the licensing before deciding to use a sketch you find.

image from book
Figure QS.1: Having a sketch to start from makes the modeling process go much easier.

This character, named Marvin Moose, could use a coat of fur, because it's a moose after all, but I'm going to stay away from fur to keep the moose more cartoony. I also could choose to apply a Paint n' Ink material to the model to give it a cartoonish look.

The goal of the project is to make the moose dance, so I'll add a biped to the finished moose character and modify it to fit the moose. With the biped in place, I'll be able to animate the dancing motions by moving the biped's bones.

With a definite plan, we're ready to begin. This Quick Start is divided into separate tutorials, with each tutorial containing a series of easy-to-follow steps. These steps are intended to show you the results of performing certain Max operations, but feel free to deviate from these steps to create your own results. Being creative and exploring the software is the best way to learn.

ON the DVD-ROW 

After each of the following tutorials I saved the scene file. You can find these files in the Quick Start directory on the book's DVD.




3ds Max 9 Bible
3ds Max 9 Bible
ISBN: 0470100893
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 383

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